Movie 43 is a collection of one-joke short films strung together as a feature and
seemingly built around this directive: Find big-name stars and see how far “out there” they’ll go
for a laugh.

Thus, there is Halle Berry, caught up in a first-date truth-or-dare game with British comedian
Stephen Merchant that involves tattoos, plastic surgery and immobility while Nicole “Snooki”
Polizzi of
Jersey Shore gives an interpretive reading of
Moby-Dick.

If you’re the type who laughs at the title of that novel, this might be the movie for you — a
dizzying array of actors in a wide variety of oh-no-they-didn’t sketches, almost all using oral-sex
and penis gags as their punch lines.

About a third of the shorts land laughs, but even the weakest material is lifted by the players.
One bit that works, directed by Elizabeth Banks, has Chloe Moretz on an after-school date, having
her first period, with every male in the house — including Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Patrick
Warburton — freaking out.

After seeing the movie, you’ll have a hard time thinking of Gerard Butler as anything but a
special-effects leprechaun, cursing at being captured and tortured “for me Lucky Charms” by Johnny
Knoxville and Seann William Scott.

Oscar nominee Naomi Watts and husband Liev Schreiber play home-schoolers who torment their
teenage son with a “real” high-school experience — an insulting teacher, a bullying gym coach,
awkward “first-date” make-out sessions with Mom and a simulated first gay come-on from Dad. “It
should be the unhappiest time in a boy’s life!”

The connecting sketches — Dennis Quaid pitching these film ideas to a stunned studio executive
(Greg Kinnear) — don’t work at all.

Movie 43 is short, despite cumbersome credits: 10 directors, a scattering of writers and a
posse of stars.

And if Emma Stone and Kieran Culkin having a screaming flirtation at a supermarket — “You look
like the kid who got
cancer for Christmas!” — doesn’t do it for you, maybe the next “big-stars short film”
will.